


Even When I Don't Remember

by dapperanachronism



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Brainwashing, Getting Together, M/M, Recovery, Temporary Amnesia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-03
Updated: 2018-01-03
Packaged: 2019-02-15 10:18:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13028958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dapperanachronism/pseuds/dapperanachronism
Summary: Steve doesn’t remember him. More accurately, Steve doesn’t remember any of them, or anything before his kidnapping. But right now, Tony is selfishly only concerned over the fact that Steve doesn’t remember him.





	Even When I Don't Remember

**Author's Note:**

  * For [IndigoNight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/IndigoNight/gifts).



> This was written for the 2017 Cap-Ironman Holiday exchange, for IndigoNight. I hope you enjoy it! Thank you to moonchilddj for the beta and the support.

“He’s awake,” the doctor tells him.

Tony jumps to his feet and is halfway to the door before she stops him, hand resting gently but firmly on Tony’s arm.

“Mr. Stark. Before you go in, there are some things you should know.”

Tony’s heart plummets.

* * *

Steve doesn’t remember him. More accurately, Steve doesn’t remember any of them, or anything before his kidnapping. But right now, Tony is selfishly only concerned over the fact that Steve doesn’t remember him. Steve doesn’t remember _them._ Not that there was much of a ‘them’ to remember. But. There was going to be. 

After all the months of dancing around each other, the months of snark, and avoiding each other, and then of spending every waking hour possible around each other, there had been a date. And Tony, who’d assumed that his day of getting excited about first dates was a thing of the ancient past, found himself feeling like a teenager all over again. 

They were going to dinner after Tony’s meeting with the board. Tony had spent the entire time watching the minutes tick away until it was time to go, distracted and giddy with anticipation. 

But when he arrived at the restaurant, Steve wasn’t there. 

And Steve never showed up. 

If it had been anyone else, Tony would have been crushed at being stood up, though he would have denied it, brushed it off and gone about his evening. But sitting there, alone at the table with a bottle of wine ready, and an empty chair across from him, Tony wasn’t crushed. He was terrified. Because Steve Rogers would never stand someone up.

What followed was one of the worst weeks of his life, and given his history, that was saying something.

It was thanks to Bucky that they were able to find Steve so quickly, but a week with HYDRA might as well be an eternity. There had still been ample time for HYDRA to inflict their damage.

Because Steve didn’t remember them.

Bucky had snapped when he found out. Talk about one hell of a trigger for him. Thank god Sam had been there to step in and take him aside. 

Everyone is back at the tower now, but nothing feels right. HYDRA might not have had enough time to imprint conditioning on Steve the way they had with Bucky, but as far as Steve is concerned, he doesn’t have a life before the lab. He was created as a blank slate, to follow orders. And now—

— Now his whole world has been turned sideways. 

They give him free rein in the tower to go where he wants, he’s not a prisoner after all, and JARVIS can monitor him. But in the first 24 hours he does little more than eat, and train. Tony orchestrates an ‘accidental’ run in with him in the kitchen, but Steve just looks at him passively, thanks him for the hospitality, and politely excuses himself.

Tony shuts himself up in his workshop after that. 

At some point, Rhodey comes in and brings him dinner, and doesn’t comment on how red and puffy Tony’s eyes are.

* * *

Tony lets himself wallow for all of a day before he decides it’s time to get his shit together. Steve might not remember him, but dammit, this is still his Steve, and he isn’t going to just give up on him. 

“J, where is Cap right now?” Tony asks, sitting himself down at his work station and pulling up his displays.

“Captain Rogers is in the main common area, reading.” “Reading, huh. What’s he reading?”

“He is reading about himself. He asked me for relevant information about Steven Grant Rogers, and Captain America,” JARVIS informs him.

“Good. Maybe that’ll knock something loose. Can you pull up Barnes’ brain scans? The first set from when he came here, and the most recent. And put the ones the doc sent us of Cap beside it.”

In front of him, the 3D displays light up, and he studies it for a moment before nodding. “Right then. Give me everything we have on Barnes’ recovery, and all the tech stuff Natasha pulled on the Winter Soldier project.”

A second later, Tony was surrounded by projections of images and documents, everything they had that might help, and he cracked his knuckles. Sure, there was a good chance that HYDRA had improved their methods, but Tony was encouraged by the fact that HYDRA had never managed to get their hands on Steve’s serum, so there was no way to compensate for it. 

He was going to get his Steve back, no matter what it took.

* * *

As it turned out, there isn’t much new that Tony is able to learn, but a lot that he is able to confirm. Aspects of Steve’s brain scans show similar patterns to Bucky’s when he first came in. The disruption in the pathways to access memories are clear. HYDRA has been ruthlessly efficient about cutting Steve off from himself, and it serves to reconfirm why the hell Steve can’t remember anything about his time before the kidnapping. The one good thing that Tony can see is that Steve wasn’t there long enough for HYDRA to start overlaying anything else. So, the good thing is, the serum should heal Steve’s brain, and he should start to remember. Eventually. Probably. The bad news is, there isn’t a damn thing Tony can do to help it go faster. They’re at the mercy of whatever Steve’s body and brain decides to do for him.

It’s not doing much to improve Tony’s mood.

He probably should have gone to bed hours ago, but his brain is still running in seventeen different directions, so it’s easier to just stay down in the shop and tinker. He’s tired, he’s stressed, he’s not dealing well, but right now, he doesn’t have the energy to care.

He’s so wrapped up in not thinking that he doesn’t even register that he has a visitor until JARVIS alerts him.

“Sir, Captain Rogers is outside the workshop. He seems hesitant to request access.” Tony’s heart leaps and then plummets, adding to the roller coaster of feelings he’s already got riding around his stomach.

“Let him in J,” Tony instructs. Steve takes a careful, calculated step in. Tony isn’t quite sure what to expect.

“Tony,” Steve says, and it comes out more of a question. Tony’s throat and chest tighten.

“Yeah, that’s me. What can I do for you?” He tries for casual but he falls short. He’s hoping that maybe Steve won’t notice.

“I-I don’t know.” Steve looks around and shakes his head, almost as if he’s shaking off a daze. “I don’t know why I came here.”

“Okay…” Tony says carefully, turning in his chair to face Steve, arms folded over his chest. Steve is still looking around, studying the workspace with intense scrutiny, so Tony waits.

“Their labs and workshops, they weren’t like this,” Steve says at last, turning his focus to Tony. “They weren’t… inviting.” 

At that Tony snorts. “You’re probably the only person who would call my workshop ‘inviting,’” he says. Steve doesn’t seems to take offence. He merely shrugs. 

“The labs I was in before were… sterile. Unwelcoming. This feels… comfortable. Familiar.” 

If Tony had any less self control, he might have started sobbing right then and there. Fortunately, his emotional tangent was interrupted by a well-placed Dummy, who beeped happily and rolled across the shop towards Steve. He raised his arm, claw opening and closing rapidly as he kept up his string of delighted beeps and boops.

“Hello,” Steve says, cocking his head slightly with interest.

“That’s Dummy,” Tony says, smiling in spite of himself at his bot’s joyous welcoming back of his friend. “Beside you on the table, Cap. There’s a little ball. Toss it, would you?”

Steve’s face twitches slightly at the nickname, almost like a flinch of pain, which Tony _definitely_ doesn’t want to think too much about, lest he end up putting his fist through something. Steve grabs the ball, and lightly tosses it across the room. Dummy squeals and tears after it. Tony swears he hears Steve laugh softly, and when Dummy returns, he eagerly throws the ball again. 

Steve seems quite content to play with Dummy, and so Tony turns back to the work he’d been poking at before Steve arrived. For a moment, he can almost convince himself everything is normal again, like Steve had never gone anywhere, and nothing had happened to him. 

Almost, but not quite.

Sometime later, once the game of fetch winds down, Tony glances up from his work as Steve takes a seat near him. His forehead is drawn tight with concentration, and he peers over at the files Tony had opened off to the side.

“Those are brain scans,” Steve says. 

Tony nods.

“My brain scans,” Steve adds. Tony nods again. Steve considers this for a moment and then asks, “why did I come down here? It felt… right. But I don’t know why.”

“You spend a lot of time down here. With me,” Tony tells him evenly. Steve nods as if this is an acceptable explanation, which, Tony supposes, it is. “You and I… we spend a lot of time together. Or well, we did.” 

To him, it was only a few weeks ago. To Steve, it never happened.

How is that even fair?

“I don’t remember,” Steve admits, and even though Tony _knows_ Steve doesn’t remember, it still stings. “I only have a few weeks’ worth of memories. And none of them are good. At least… until now.”

“Must be disorienting,” Tony says, not knowing how else to respond.

“Yeah. It is. I know I have this whole life that I can’t remember. It just feels empty. Sometimes, when I sleep, I think I dream about my memories. And when I wake up, for a second I think I have it. But it doesn’t last.”

“They’ll come back,” Tony tells him. 

“You don’t know that,” Steve snaps suddenly. Tony startles, and draws back for half a moment. But he’s never backed down from Steve before and he isn’t going to start now.

“No, I don’t know for sure, but I can make an educated guess. And I’m a genius, so you know, my educated guesses are pretty damn good.”

Steve huffs in annoyance and disbelief. 

“Alright Capsicle, I’ll prove it. Come here.” Tony takes Steve across the lab to the small scale portable CT scanner he borrowed after calling in a favour. He convinces Steve to let him take another scan of his head, and although it takes some time, he eventually gets the results up on his display.

“Look here, and here,” he says, pulling up another image. “This is your brain when we first got you back, the scan the doctors took while you were still unconscious in medical.” He points over to the new image. “This here, is the one that we just took. See the differences here? There are already neural pathways rerouting themselves. Here, you can see where HYDRA’s work intentionally cut off the connections to the part of your brain that stores memories. But, your brain is already healing itself, and reconnecting. You said you were dreaming in memories?”

Steve nods.

“That’s a sign that you’re healing, a good sign.” Tony could feel himself growing more excited, more hopeful for the first time in days. 

“Wait, so you’re serious?” Steve asks him.

Tony blinks. “Of course I’m serious. You think i was just what, telling you you were going to get better to make you feel better?”

Steve shrugs. 

“Right. Well I know you don’t know me that well right now. But trust me. As soon as you remember me, you’ll realise how ridiculous that it.”

“I want to remember you Tony,” Steve says with sudden intensity.

Tony swallows hard. “I want you to remember me, too.”

* * *

Surprisingly, it does get easier after that. Every morning, Tony makes a point to find Steve and ask him what he dreamed about, or what he thinks he remembers. Steve starts asking a lot more questions, and Tony is only too eager to fill in the blanks.

“We fought, didn’t we. When we met,” Steve asks one morning over coffee.

“We sure did,” Tony chuckles. He doesn’t add how incredibly hot it was standing toe to toe with Steve, the tension crackling between them right from the get go. “And you were really sassy to me.”

“It seems to run on some sort of electricity,” Steve says suddenly.

“Yup.. Captain Sassypants over here.”

He asks a lot about his time before the plane went down. Tony leaves Bucky to field those questions, but he always stays close by. So does Sam. 

Steve finds him one night in the kitchen, up late, pouring himself another cup of coffee. Before he can drink it though, Steve takes the cup from his hands and offers him a cup of hot chocolate instead. Tony takes the cup and sips carefully. It tastes exactly how it’s supposed to. Steve heads out to the balcony, and Tony follows behind without saying anything. For a moment, they stand together, staring out over the city.

“We do this a lot,” Steve says. This time it’s not a question. Tony nods.

“Yeah.” It’s a thing they do when they can’t sleep. Steve makes hot chocolate, and they sit outside together, watching the lights and the life of the city. It’s peaceful, calming, a moment that belongs just to the two of them. Steve is remembering more and more every day. So it really shouldn’t surprise Tony when Steve says,

“We were supposed to go on a date.” 

Tony’s breath catches in his throat, and he holds the cup a little tighter in his hands. He’s grateful that he has something else to look at down below, because he’s not sure he can meet Steve’s gaze.

“Yeah. We were. The day you were taken,” Tony says quietly. A moment later, he feels Steve’s arm settle around his shoulders. 

“I think I’ve had a pretty bad run of missing first dates.”

Tony barks out a laugh. “Well you’re not wrong there. Lucky for you, they’re all for good reasons.”

“Crashing a plane. Getting kidnapped. Just totally normal things right?” Steve says flatly.

Tony shakes his head. “Nothing about you is normal, Steve.”

Steve raises an eyebrow.

“I mean that you’re extraordinary,” Tony says quickly. “Always thought so.”

“Well,” Steve says slowly, “I think it’s good that I found someone extraordinary, too.”

“Yeah?” Tony asks, finally looking up at him.

“Yeah. Someone that I feel comfortable with, even when I can’t remember myself.”

There was a time in his life that Tony would have made some flippant comment and walked away. But now — now he’s stared at loss too many times and felt his heart break in too many pieces. He knows when he’s damn lucky to have something back. So he curls into Steve’s embrace a little and rests his head on Steve’s shoulder.

“I don’t suppose, you’d let me try and take you out again?” Tony asks, listening to the steady sound of Steve’s heartbeat.

“You can take me out, definitely,” Steve assures him. “But just so you know, I’m already yours, even when I don’t remember.”


End file.
